The BBC released a list of ten books to read in june. Has anyone read any, particularly the Naomi Jackson novel?
Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill
Dionne, who is “sixteen going on a bitter, if beautiful, forty-five” and her tomboy sister Phaedra, ten, are sent to spend the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth on “clannish” Bird Hill in Barbados. Their divorced mother back in Brooklyn is too depressed to care for them. Hyacinth, a midwife and Obeah healer, believes “life was not just easier but sweeter with family by her side.” She has much to teach Phaedra about herbs and keeping track of her dreams. Dionne dislikes the island, and is eager to find diversions, including eligible guys. As the summer is about to end, their mother commits suicide and their father arrives to take them back to Brooklyn. But they may have found a home on Bird Hill. A winning coming-of-age tale with Caribbean flavour. (Credit: Penguin Press)
Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation
Algerian columnist Kamel Daoud won France’s 2015 Prix Goncourt for best first novel with this book, a response to and a dialogue with Camus’ The Stranger. Daoud reframes the narrative for today’s audience, selecting as his narrator Harun, the brother of the “nameless Arab” killed by Camus’ anti-hero, Meursault. Seventy years after his brother’s murder, he tells the other side of the story, beginning, “Mama’s still alive today.” Harun says he was a boy when his brother was killed. He encountered The Stranger in his twenties, and it has haunted him ever since. “I’ve walked around with the kind of endless monologue in my head,” Daoud writes, with “a terrible urge to shout out to the world that I was Musa’s brother and that we, Mama and I, were the only genuine heroes of that famous story, but who would have believed us?” (Credit: Other Press)
Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie
Mazie Phillips, Queen of the Bowery, “the truth-telling proprietress of The Venice, the famed New York City movie theater”, is based on a Lower East Side woman Joseph Mitchell profiled in The New Yorker. Attenberg (author of The Middlesteins) brings her to life primarily through her fictional diaries, beginning in 1907 when she is 10 and continuing through the Great War, the Jazz Age and the Depression. She also weaves in sections from her unpublished autobiography – “The streets are dirty, but they’re home and they’re beautiful to me. The bums know the beauty of it.” – and fictitious oral history accounts from people who knew her. It all adds up to an exuberant portrait of an unforgettable woman and the city she loves. (Credit: Grand Central)
Jonathan Galassi, Muse
Galassi is a publisher, poet and translator with decades of inside knowledge of the publishing industry. He uses this background to great effect in this slyly sophisticated roman à clef. Galassi slips the fictitious poet Ida Perkins into the 20th Century literary canon and puts her at the centre of a literary competition between publisher Purcell and Stern, founded by Homer Stern, and Sterling Wainright’s Impetus Editions. Homer’s young protégé Paul is obsessed with Ida. A business lunch with her agent leads to a meeting with the icon, who is sequestered in a Venetian palazzo. When Ida entrusts him with the manuscript of her revelatory last work, Mnemosyne, Paul becomes a major player. Galassi concludes his delicious series of set-pieces with a witty “concise bibliography” of Ida Perkins’ work, including an award-winning collection called Translucent Traumas. (Credit: Knopf)
Milan Kundera, The Festival of Insignificance
Global fans of The Unbearable Lightness of Being will welcome the first new novel from Kundera in 13 years. The Czech-born author, who has lived in France for more than 40 years, is frequently mentioned as a Nobel candidate. In his new novel his characters Alain, Ramon, Charles and Caliban – Kundera calls them “heroes” – gather in Paris for endless conversations with ironic asides about their own insignificance. As the novel opens, Alain is meditating on the naval. “But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body…?” At a later point, he remembers his mother staring intently at his naval when he was ten, then touching it with her index finger and kissing him. “He never saw her again.” Kundera’s latest is brief, witty, effortlessly potent. (Credit: Harper)
William Styron, My Generation
My Generation, edited by James LW West III, spans a half century of Styron’s nonfiction, from his 1951 autobiographical note accompanying the New York Herald Tribune review of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, through to his 2001 speech honoring Philip Roth as winner of the MacDowell Colony Medal. Styron defines his generation as “those of us who approached our majority during World War II”. Preserved among these 91 pieces are gripping, unsparing essays about the American South, race, slavery, war, depression and his misdiagnosis of syphilis as a young Marine – as well as sketches of his literary friends, a “clutch of talents” including James Baldwin, James Jones, Terry Southern, James Dickey, Irwin Shaw and the duo of Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, who conducted the first ever Paris Review interview with Styron in Paris. A must for every Styron fan’s library. (Credit: Random House)
Richard Schickel, Keepers
Schickel was film critic for Life magazine from 1965 to 1972, moved to Time until 2009, and now reviews for Truthdig. From a lifetime of viewing (he estimates he’s seen at least 22,590 movies), he selects an essential list of his personal favourites that follows one premise: “It’s about pleasure. It’s about the movies I would have you download tonight and watch with delight, and no sense of dutifulness.” He begins with the first talkies, dubbing Murnau’s Nosferatu “the greatest of the Dracula movies” and finding Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus “breathtaking”. He covers directors from DW Griffith to Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. He’s a fan of Taxi Driver, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Babette’s Feast, Wings of Desire – and Errol Flynn. Keepers is fun, for Schickel, and his lucky readers. (Credit: Knopf)
Katherine Taylor, Valley Fever
Ingrid Palamede grew up in Fresno, an hour-and-a-half north of Hollywood. Her father owns 20,000 acres of the best land in California’s Central Valley, including a section that grows a crop of Cabernet. Now she’s back, after a breakup, to witness her parents’ financial decline. Her father Ned grows ill and Ingrid discovers he’s seriously leveraged at the bank. Reluctantly, she becomes the fourth generation in the family business. It’s a terrible year – drought, grape glut – and every farmer in the valley is in trouble. Uncle Felix, Ned’s “best friend”, resorts to treachery. Taylor captures the Fresno heat, which “seemed to get bigger at night”, the smell of raisins drying, the pleasures of tree-fresh almonds and peaches, frozen Thompson seedless grapes and wine of all varieties. This family saga is acutely detailed and infused with sensual delights. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral
Walbert (author of A Short History of Women) sets this resonant impressionistic novel in a post 9/11 Manhattan rocked by terrorist threats, and the alarming speed with which the ocean is rising. Her vivid cast of characters includes Marie and Simone, two widows haunted by childhood memories of wartime France and the Chelsea they knew before the Highline; their art teacher Sid Morris, head of the soon to be defunct School of Inspired Arts and Marie’s neighbour Elizabeth, who struggles with the complex new demands of urban parenting. Walbert’s title is drawn from a Debussy piece – the “musical version” of Cezanne, about the Cathedral of Ys off the Normandy coast. She accentuates the ways in which the past is being submerged in an uncertain present, and how we find comfort. A poetic and profound exploration of transcendent love, memory and the ever shifting present. (Credit: Scribner)
Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty
The set-up for Vida’s audacious novel, written masterfully in the risky second-person, goes like this: You fly from Miami to Casablanca, check into the Golden Tulip hotel, and moments later your backpack is missing. “You think of everything you have in it – laptop, wallet with credit cards, and all the cash…” And the passport. At the police station, a black backpack turns up. You take it, and a new identity. You are an actress’s stand-in on a film set, getting so close to the actress it’s hard to know who you are anymore. The fourth in Vida’s “women in crisis” series is a startling and often comic take on a woman’s identity issues, as atmospheric as the title poem, Rumi’s The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty, which includes lines like this: “You’re in your body like a plant is solid in the ground, yet you’re wind.” (Credit: Ecco).
Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill
Dionne, who is “sixteen going on a bitter, if beautiful, forty-five” and her tomboy sister Phaedra, ten, are sent to spend the summer of 1989 with their grandmother Hyacinth on “clannish” Bird Hill in Barbados. Their divorced mother back in Brooklyn is too depressed to care for them. Hyacinth, a midwife and Obeah healer, believes “life was not just easier but sweeter with family by her side.” She has much to teach Phaedra about herbs and keeping track of her dreams. Dionne dislikes the island, and is eager to find diversions, including eligible guys. As the summer is about to end, their mother commits suicide and their father arrives to take them back to Brooklyn. But they may have found a home on Bird Hill. A winning coming-of-age tale with Caribbean flavour. (Credit: Penguin Press)
Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation
Algerian columnist Kamel Daoud won France’s 2015 Prix Goncourt for best first novel with this book, a response to and a dialogue with Camus’ The Stranger. Daoud reframes the narrative for today’s audience, selecting as his narrator Harun, the brother of the “nameless Arab” killed by Camus’ anti-hero, Meursault. Seventy years after his brother’s murder, he tells the other side of the story, beginning, “Mama’s still alive today.” Harun says he was a boy when his brother was killed. He encountered The Stranger in his twenties, and it has haunted him ever since. “I’ve walked around with the kind of endless monologue in my head,” Daoud writes, with “a terrible urge to shout out to the world that I was Musa’s brother and that we, Mama and I, were the only genuine heroes of that famous story, but who would have believed us?” (Credit: Other Press)
Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie
Mazie Phillips, Queen of the Bowery, “the truth-telling proprietress of The Venice, the famed New York City movie theater”, is based on a Lower East Side woman Joseph Mitchell profiled in The New Yorker. Attenberg (author of The Middlesteins) brings her to life primarily through her fictional diaries, beginning in 1907 when she is 10 and continuing through the Great War, the Jazz Age and the Depression. She also weaves in sections from her unpublished autobiography – “The streets are dirty, but they’re home and they’re beautiful to me. The bums know the beauty of it.” – and fictitious oral history accounts from people who knew her. It all adds up to an exuberant portrait of an unforgettable woman and the city she loves. (Credit: Grand Central)
Jonathan Galassi, Muse
Galassi is a publisher, poet and translator with decades of inside knowledge of the publishing industry. He uses this background to great effect in this slyly sophisticated roman à clef. Galassi slips the fictitious poet Ida Perkins into the 20th Century literary canon and puts her at the centre of a literary competition between publisher Purcell and Stern, founded by Homer Stern, and Sterling Wainright’s Impetus Editions. Homer’s young protégé Paul is obsessed with Ida. A business lunch with her agent leads to a meeting with the icon, who is sequestered in a Venetian palazzo. When Ida entrusts him with the manuscript of her revelatory last work, Mnemosyne, Paul becomes a major player. Galassi concludes his delicious series of set-pieces with a witty “concise bibliography” of Ida Perkins’ work, including an award-winning collection called Translucent Traumas. (Credit: Knopf)
Milan Kundera, The Festival of Insignificance
Global fans of The Unbearable Lightness of Being will welcome the first new novel from Kundera in 13 years. The Czech-born author, who has lived in France for more than 40 years, is frequently mentioned as a Nobel candidate. In his new novel his characters Alain, Ramon, Charles and Caliban – Kundera calls them “heroes” – gather in Paris for endless conversations with ironic asides about their own insignificance. As the novel opens, Alain is meditating on the naval. “But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body…?” At a later point, he remembers his mother staring intently at his naval when he was ten, then touching it with her index finger and kissing him. “He never saw her again.” Kundera’s latest is brief, witty, effortlessly potent. (Credit: Harper)
William Styron, My Generation
My Generation, edited by James LW West III, spans a half century of Styron’s nonfiction, from his 1951 autobiographical note accompanying the New York Herald Tribune review of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, through to his 2001 speech honoring Philip Roth as winner of the MacDowell Colony Medal. Styron defines his generation as “those of us who approached our majority during World War II”. Preserved among these 91 pieces are gripping, unsparing essays about the American South, race, slavery, war, depression and his misdiagnosis of syphilis as a young Marine – as well as sketches of his literary friends, a “clutch of talents” including James Baldwin, James Jones, Terry Southern, James Dickey, Irwin Shaw and the duo of Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, who conducted the first ever Paris Review interview with Styron in Paris. A must for every Styron fan’s library. (Credit: Random House)
Richard Schickel, Keepers
Schickel was film critic for Life magazine from 1965 to 1972, moved to Time until 2009, and now reviews for Truthdig. From a lifetime of viewing (he estimates he’s seen at least 22,590 movies), he selects an essential list of his personal favourites that follows one premise: “It’s about pleasure. It’s about the movies I would have you download tonight and watch with delight, and no sense of dutifulness.” He begins with the first talkies, dubbing Murnau’s Nosferatu “the greatest of the Dracula movies” and finding Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus “breathtaking”. He covers directors from DW Griffith to Howard Hawks, Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. He’s a fan of Taxi Driver, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Babette’s Feast, Wings of Desire – and Errol Flynn. Keepers is fun, for Schickel, and his lucky readers. (Credit: Knopf)
Katherine Taylor, Valley Fever
Ingrid Palamede grew up in Fresno, an hour-and-a-half north of Hollywood. Her father owns 20,000 acres of the best land in California’s Central Valley, including a section that grows a crop of Cabernet. Now she’s back, after a breakup, to witness her parents’ financial decline. Her father Ned grows ill and Ingrid discovers he’s seriously leveraged at the bank. Reluctantly, she becomes the fourth generation in the family business. It’s a terrible year – drought, grape glut – and every farmer in the valley is in trouble. Uncle Felix, Ned’s “best friend”, resorts to treachery. Taylor captures the Fresno heat, which “seemed to get bigger at night”, the smell of raisins drying, the pleasures of tree-fresh almonds and peaches, frozen Thompson seedless grapes and wine of all varieties. This family saga is acutely detailed and infused with sensual delights. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Kate Walbert, The Sunken Cathedral
Walbert (author of A Short History of Women) sets this resonant impressionistic novel in a post 9/11 Manhattan rocked by terrorist threats, and the alarming speed with which the ocean is rising. Her vivid cast of characters includes Marie and Simone, two widows haunted by childhood memories of wartime France and the Chelsea they knew before the Highline; their art teacher Sid Morris, head of the soon to be defunct School of Inspired Arts and Marie’s neighbour Elizabeth, who struggles with the complex new demands of urban parenting. Walbert’s title is drawn from a Debussy piece – the “musical version” of Cezanne, about the Cathedral of Ys off the Normandy coast. She accentuates the ways in which the past is being submerged in an uncertain present, and how we find comfort. A poetic and profound exploration of transcendent love, memory and the ever shifting present. (Credit: Scribner)
Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty
The set-up for Vida’s audacious novel, written masterfully in the risky second-person, goes like this: You fly from Miami to Casablanca, check into the Golden Tulip hotel, and moments later your backpack is missing. “You think of everything you have in it – laptop, wallet with credit cards, and all the cash…” And the passport. At the police station, a black backpack turns up. You take it, and a new identity. You are an actress’s stand-in on a film set, getting so close to the actress it’s hard to know who you are anymore. The fourth in Vida’s “women in crisis” series is a startling and often comic take on a woman’s identity issues, as atmospheric as the title poem, Rumi’s The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty, which includes lines like this: “You’re in your body like a plant is solid in the ground, yet you’re wind.” (Credit: Ecco).
